Clickstream

Critical Path Transmogrifies Email and Snarfs Your Information?

I found the information about Critical Path in this rumor report to be interesting. Maybe someone there read the book and decided that the information about URL rewriting and redirection was too useful to pass up.

Basically, every time an email recipient clicks on a URL in one of those rewritten email messages, it would generate an entry in CP's web server logs. With some simple analysis of the logs - plain vanilla Analog would do - they would have a nice report of what people are interested in linking to, what they click on, percentage of clickthrouhgs, etc. If they have enough email traffic then they could gather a lot of useful - and salable - information in a short time.

I do find it hard to believe that a service provider would reach into their customer's email messages and rewrite all the URLs without their knowledge, but worse things have been done. My guess is they are doing it and providing analysis to the people who use them as a service provider, rather than doing this on their own. I wonder if anyone has confirmation in the form of email that went through their URL transmogrifier?

Posted by Mark Wednesday, June 25, 2003 11:36:00 PM | permalink |